It's no secret to anyone paying attention that 2020 has been challenging, to say the least. From the onset, our cash-strapped company came into the year with plans to begin scaling nationally by focusing more on e-commerce and securing large retail accounts and less on in-person sales and independently owned single-store units. Unfortunately, our plan called for one more solid year of in-person events to generate the revenue needed to support our new manufacturing partnership. Still, with 100% of our scheduled events canceled, we immediately lost almost $100,000 in projected revenue and quickly ran out of inventory.

One thing should be abundantly clear. We do not give up. That's not to say that we don't understand the importance of knowing when to walk away, we do not feel that we have reached that point, and we remain confident in our belief that our full potential is yet to be reached, which we think is partially evidenced in the following graphics.

We launched our Shopify store on November 19th, 2019, after spending the previous four years struggling with a Woocommerce website. Since launching the new site, we have an average 3.26% conversion rate, $40.73 average order value, and a 22.25% returning customer rate. As you'll see above and below, those metrics increase substantially as we get into the holiday shopping season, and it is important to note that aside from sending out an email or two, these increases are organic, which we believe further proves that we are far from reaching our full potential.

With inventory levels at capacity and protocols in place to capture and reutilize the customer data generated online, we can begin to focus more on tasks that generate revenue as opposed to those that eat away at our margins, like producing every treat by hand.

Below is a snapshot of total sales via our Shopify website from November 1 to December 3, 2020. The majority of these sales came from the Western New York region. We believe that a lot of revenue is being left on the table by not focusing the appropriate amount of time and money on targeted digital marketing and paid ads. Both Facebook and ReCharge (our subscription plugin) could be performing at much higher levels, and we have barely scratched the surface concerning potential audience reach nationally.

Sales for BFCM in 2020 represent an increase of 138% compared to BFCM 2019, and again this is with virtually no paid advertising and in the absence of any structured marketing strategy.

Gang, the potential just with our eCommerce (do not forget Chewy and Amazon) is vastly untouched. Please do what you can to help us get the word out, and let's raise the remaining $47K that we need to close this round, restart production, and get our treats into the bellies of happy dogs all over America! We can't do it without our Pack!